Terrible/Perfect

Pernicious microbes

A little sick turned out to be a lot sick, for both girls. We're muddling through, one stitch at a time.

Ker-choo

The littler one is sick. It's very sad. The bigger one started at it tonight, too, and I expect the next week will be spent nursing them both through what is, by all local accounts, a bastard of a flu virus.

Everything is put on hold when there is a household illness (unless, of course, the ill person is me). Baby can't sleep because of her gnarly cough and high fever and stuffy nose and whatnot, which means I don't sleep, either. Mr. Terrible is home, but he is Not the Mama on even the best occasions, so when the wee bairn is sick a mere shift of his thoughts in her general direction, or some slight whiff of a suggestion that he might be considering moving towards her, at some point during this calendar year, is enough to make her yell "I want MAMA!" and shoot him a look that, were it to physically manifest itself, would run across the room and slap him right inna face. So through no fault of his own, he's no help. We're watching a lot of movies. I'm knitting when I can, trying to get in some housework here and there or make a dash in the snow down to the library. Mostly, I'm holding sad, sad Baby.

I'm tired, but I feel well. Which is awesome. Not getting sick when everyone around you has some kind of bug, even though you don't get enough sleep or exercise and you historically have eaten a great deal of unfood, is a wonderful feeling. Not in a schadenfreude sort of way, because it sucks to see the people you care about get sick, but in the sort of way that makes you wish your immune system would appear in front of you in the form of the video for Whoomp! (There It Is) by Tag Team, because clearly that's the kind of immune system you're working with. Party on party people let me hear some noise. Wave your hands in the air shake your derrier!

I like not getting sick. I intend to continue doing it.

Here is another thing that I like:

That is sweet peppers, onions, red potatoes and vegan sausage over polenta, not from a can or box, cooked fresh in my home and, this is extremely important, I DID NOT MAKE IT.

Mr. Terrible did.

In the future I would like to invent some way of explaining the magnitude of moments such as this one that doesn't publicly shame and emasculate Mr. T, but I'm in the mood for brevity tonight: dude can't cook. Which was fine, more or less, for a long time, and then I told him he had to learn and I wasn't going to hold his hand but Mollie Katzen would and I told him to pick whatever he wanted to make out of her amazing book and make it. Tonight. To his everlasting credit, he just sort of shrugged and picked out a couple recipes and made a list for me to take to the store, and then when I got home he, ehr, got cooking.

He was absolutely self-sufficient, except for this exchange:

Him, from the kitchen: Can you come in here?

Me: ....no. Why?

Him: I want you to look at something.

Me: No. Describe your problem.

Him: I think the potatoes you got are bigger than the ones that the recipe calls for.

Me: ...

Him: ...

Me: So what's the problem?

Him: The recipe wants me to cut them in half.

Me: ...

Him: ...

Me: Couldn't you just...cut them into more pieces?

Him: ...oh.

Ha! He has a master's degree.

Happily, good sense and old fashioned careful reading and following of directions won the day, and a lifetime of learned helplessness in domestic affairs didn't stop him from making that gorgeous plate of food, which was cooked perfectly. It was subtle and rich and real and satisfying. The whole experience of him cooking was amazing, actually...sitting in the living room with the girls, smelling garlic and sauteeing peppers and onions and not hearing a peep from him, then sitting down at the table to be served and to eat this lovely, nutritious, delicious meal that he had prepared for us. 

My hat is off to him. And, perhaps sadly for him, his "How many cups of water go into the pot to make macaroni and cheese?" bluff has been called: with just a little skillful guidance from a top-notch book, he hit it out of the park. He is now Friday night dinner man.

His next culinary move is clear: he has to learn to make Tom Kha Gai so that when karma comes calling and I get this ripping flu myself he'll be all ready to nurse me back to health with spicy coconut milk broth, even though I made fun of him on the internet.

Wonderland

Snow day!

We live "in town" (it's a small city, with a population of something like 40,000) in a mixed business and residential neighborhood; the street out front is bustling and, functionally, we have no yard, so my kids rarely get to play outside when we're at home. But snow! Snow keeps cars off the road and blurs the normal lines between sidewalks and streets and alleyways. Suddenly there is a whole huge quiet outside world for them to stretch themselves in.

Mr. Terrible is home all week, so all four of us bundled up in our improvised it-never-snows-around-here gear (and here I admit that I am always puffed up with maternal pride and a keen sensation of Industry and Virtue at the utility and eccentric beauty of my handknit woolens) and went out and then back in again when Baby refused to put her mittens back on and then cried because her hands were cold.

Perhaps above even scrunching bootsqueaks and the appearance that everything is topped off with bright bright white mounds of frosting, I love the vacillating bipolar flurry of a snow day. Outside inside outside inside outside and back in again, for refreshment and a spin in the dryer: clothing or children or both, take your pick.

Today we are warming back up again with Alice's Adventures in Wonderland read by Jim Dale, plain yogurt topped with apple cinnamon preserves and a handful of granola, and warm cups of Holy Basil infusion.

Extra honey for the kid with the runny nose and the cough.

Tomorrow is now

It's February. There might be snow tonight.

And right now I'm thinking thoughts about a big stack of strawberry flats, locally grown black walnuts, growing beans, peas and tomatoes in my yard, getting an upright freezer, pricing tray dehydrators, how concerned I need to be about bears when we go mountain huckleberry picking, whether or not I might make wine, just for kicks, from our thick-skinned, juicy tart grapes, putting grape leaves in the jars when I can garlic, filling buckets with blackberries, discovering, somewhere, an abandoned orchard, asking our neighbor if we might pick the plums he lets fall then sweeps up into the garbage can, and making fruit leather and homemade Larabars from all that gathered, dehydrated fruit (or from what I buy at the Co-op tomorrow because I'm not waiting to try that). I might do it all; apparently (and I didn't know this, but it's true), quitting junk food gives you superpowers. I did, and I have them now.

Laserbeam. Eyes.

Like Cyclops, only not super dumb.

Notes

-I started writing a book this week. It was supposed to be a piece of creative nonfiction. I had research materials on the topic in the house and a conceptual structure in place in my mind. When I sat down to write it (it was in the moment that I began typing "Stupid blank page!" onto a stupid blank page) a novel dropped on my head. Figuratively speaking. 

-For the last few years I have been trying to come up with a solid fiction idea. A short story would have sufficed. Nothing was happening. And then it did.

-Starting to write fiction by writing a novel is insane. But the story is definitely a novel. So whatever.

-If you really want to know, it is a young adult fantasy. It is not about vampires.

-After spewing a detailed plot description into a document, and making notes for characterization and odds and ends, I started the first draft. If by some miracle I maintain my current rate of five or six pages every day, I will reach my anticipated page length of 300 or so pages in about a month and a half. Doubling that time frame seems more realistic.

-So far my first draft is unreadable. I anticipate revision taking some time. But: I'm eight pages into a first draft. When your imagination has not been in the habit of giving up the goods in any useful form, having eight unreadable pages is Nothing to Shake a Stick At.

-At around page seven I gained a functional grasp of what "show" looks like, as opposed to "tell". Both have their place. Things have been looking significantly better since that point.

-Again, learning how to write fiction by writing a novel is ridiculous. But I'm going to do it anyway.

-I have found that writing comes much more easily and begins from a more complete place when I make guitar face and talk to myself. This may be unique to me, but I suspect that it is one of the sorts of habits that makes writing best suited for stark solitude.

-I can write while listening to music. If it matches the tone of what I'm writing, it actually seems to be helpful. That surprises me. I've had Standchen on repeat.

-I think a little wine might help, too. A little. Let's not get all Hemingway about it.

-The best, and I do mean the very best aspect of this budding writing life (and it takes over your brain! It does, it does!) is that I have said the words "I'm writing a novel" to my daughter and, after looking at me in momentary disbelief, she has fully accepted that A PERSON CAN CREATE. People, even mothers, decide to write books and then write them. Just like that.

-She has come up with all sorts of ideas for novels now, mostly about komodo dragons. I didn't tell her that the process is exquisitely awful and most writers hate it.

-My aim is to write during the part of the day where Baby is napping, and at night after the kids are in bed. I'm tired.

-I caught myself reading something about Charlie Sheen in the internet a few minutes ago, and stopped mid-article because I want to write my book a whole lot more than I want to spend my time thinking about Charlie Sheen.

-Writing this blog post has felt extremely costly, time-wise. It will probably not be repeated for a while.

-While I typed the other day, Big Kid came up to the table and sat next to me and listened to The Cunning Little Vixen. That was very cool.

-I think I've finally given up on trying to be a good housewife. But not on being a good mother. And there are a lot of ways to do that.

 

Pretend Soup

Mollie Katzen.

Where do I start.

When I was 20 years old and coming up for air from a rough, rough adolescence and really beginning to think about how to take care of myself, the very first cookbook I bought was Moosewood Restaurant Low-Fat Favorites. I believe I bought it because I was at a bookstore, in the cookbook section, for some reason vocalizing that I didn't know where to begin as a newly-minted vegetarian, and a young woman who was there with her mom buying her books her about-to-begin stint at The Culinary Institute of America just reached over, pulled it off the shelf and said "I've been a vegetarian my whole life, you want the Moosewood books". She was totally right. I also remember being absolutely shocked to realize in that moment that a person could go to trade school. And then I thought DAMMIT ALL TO HELL WHY DIDN'T ANYONE TELL ME THAT.

(Really I probably ought to have gone to Mount Holyoke as my high school English teacher rather enigmatically suggested I do, and studied English, and become a person who writes things. Why didn't I do that? Oh well.)

Anyway.

Katzen.

Mollie Katzen was a co-founder of the Moosewood Restaurant the author of a string of cookbooks geared towards a whole foods, plant-based diet, which is what I have been striving to eat for the last decade with varying degrees of success. I grew up eating possibly the worst mix of the Standard American Diet (SAD) at my dad's house (tons of meat, fluffy, buttery potatoes, snack foods, ice cream, soda...the whole nine yards) and the misguided "fat is bad" diet of the 1990s at my mom's house: margarine (hydrogenated, of course), lots of pasta, and highly processed fat-free foods. I don't mean to insult my parents, or to be ungrateful...they were busy, working people with picky children to feed and they were feeding us with the best knowledge they had at the time. Unfortunately, both the SAD and the Fat Free! craze are/were terrible.

There is a fair bit of controversy in the food-obsessed world right now that can basically be summed up as this: either a)saturated fats and red meat are bad or b)carbohydrates in the form of grain, legume and some tuber foods are bad. I won't dredge any of that up here, but fortunately ABSOLUTELY EVERYONE* agrees at this point that simple sugars and processed grains are the Antichrist, and a whole foods diet is the only way to go for long-term health. "Whole foods" means the stuff that you could quite easily go find living or growing outside: vegetables, fruits, grains, beans, cows, pigs, chickens, that kind of thing. It means not ingesting stuff that requires input from a person with an advanced degree in a hard science, or multiple-step processes in windowless factories involving large stainless steel vats and Latin names. It's really pretty simple, except for the whole Grains and Legumes v. LARD MEAT thing. (For the record I'm pretty sure Mollie Katzen is not on Team Lard Meat.)

I'm not a vegetarian anymore, having come around (and around and around) to something like "vegetable foods, plus sustainable fish and probably some poultry, no dairy", but I spent my 20s steeping myself in the whole foods, vegetarian food culture, much of my education happening at the figurative knee of Ms. Katzen. It was very much a beginner's journey. While my siblings and I were treated to a few cooking classes and encouraged to experiment in the kitchen (thanks, Mom!) I had no idea, at 20, how to cook dried beans. I suddenly found myself Not Eating Meat, scrambling to feed myself, and utterly at a loss. An early experiment in the college apartment-style housing had me tossing dried black beans in a pot and being dumbfounded when 20 minutes later they were still hard as rocks. It was the Moosewood book that corrected my folly, and, truly, taught me how to eat. I've strayed far, very far, from the mark over the years (both Coca Cola and potato chips are vegan, after all), I've often taken terrible care of my body, but all the while knowing that when I'm ready, I know exactly what I'm supposed to be doing.

And, thanks in large part to Mollie Katzen and the Moosewood Collective, despite my own issues with feeding myself right, I know how to feed my kids.

Big Kid is both a picky eater and an affirmed vegetarian. Will. Not. Eat. Animals. My husband is a firm vegetarian, it's how we raised her, and, for now, it's how she feels, so I've struggled with keeping the shitty vegetarian convenience foods out, and keeping fruits and vegetables front and center. Even after everything I've learned, I struggle to keep my family table in line with what I know to be best, not with how I grew up eating. Just because the frozen, boxed chikkin nuggets are meat-free doesn't mean they're not total crap.

I'm not sure why I hadn't thought of this earlier, but recently it occurred to me that the best way to give my kids a hand up with good eating habits is to have them cook family meals.

Enter the Katzen:

Mollie has written a series of cooking books for children: Pretend Soup, Salad People for preschoolers and up, and Honest Pretzels for ages 8 and up. They are brilliant.

I have investigated a number of cookbooks for children since realizing that my girls need, as they become old enough, to take a meaningful role in the household's eating, and often they are introductory lessons in SAD, having children don aprons and hats (cute!) to turn processed ingredients into nutritionally void garbage foods (less cute).

Katzen, on the other hand, has children cooking from scratch using real food ingredients to make meals and snacks that most parents would totally be stoked on them eating. There are hand-drawn, step-by-step pictorial instructions for each recipe that my five year-old can "read" with very little help from me. She can also tell what each recipe is, more or less, which lets her peruse and decide on her own what she wants to try her hand at. 

Our first foray to the market (yes, the girls will be menu planning, budgeting and marketing with me) we brought home ingredients for the first three recipes she wanted to make for HER dinner nights (Saturday and Sunday): pizza, Zucchini Moons, and Lemon Lime Soda.

I'm a bit ashamed to admit I hadn't cooked with my girl at all before this (it's been hard for me to trust her and be patient with the process) but damned if she didn't dive right in and nail it her first time out.

The following night she wanted to make Surprise Oatmeal and (not so surprising) Lemon Lime Soda again.

She was braver than she ever has been about trying the zucchini (one whole moon down the hatch!), didn't pick too many of the vegetables that she chose to put on the pizza off, and took several large bites of her nut-enriched oatmeal (we went with walnuts instead of sunflower seeds in the oatmeal, and steel cut instead of rolled oats). This was a Good Thing (did I mention that my girl is picky?). I'm incredibly grateful to have the Katzen books for her; I'm not willing to compromise on the whole foods aspect of our eating at home (although we're not super rigid, especially when it comes to social situations; we try not to make food a huge "thing"), but I want her to have some self-determination, and to have fun. Cooking is a great delight, after all.

It's amazing how much of a difference it has already made for her to be a driver in the process of meal making. She's so proud of HER food, of HER meal...what SHE did for her family. I'm thrilled to see how this evolves for her. I'm comforted by the knowledge that I will send her out into the world with a totally solid foundation in meal planning and cooking, which are absolutely essential life skills. Does it seem so far fetched that the food-related American health crises we hear so much about may be lessened if we all knew a bit better how to cook? I don't mean heat up, I mean: cook.

We're on the right road. The next step is to get a copy of Get Cooking for my poor, dear Mr. Terrible, who is about as cooking illiterate as they come.

After eight years of marriage in which he managed to still not learn to cook, he is now on the hook for Friday night dinners.

Baby's still free to just eat.

*Except for soft drink and junk food producers. I'm guessing they will be cleaving intensely to the "eat responsibly" line in the coming years, suggesting that their foods can be enjoyed as an occasional treat in an otherwise healthy diet, never mind that their bottom line entirely depends on people not eating responsibly.